#technotes

Today's experiment: Replacing media queries with mixins via the @content directive.

It sounds stupid, but for the life of me—and I've been designing responsive sites for six years now—I can't remember the media query syntax. Every time I need a media query, I have to check back through my files to find an example. That's annoying.

So I created the following mixins:

@mixin small() { @media screen and (min-width: $small) { @content; } } @mixin medium() { @media screen and (min-width: $medium) { @content; } } @mixin large() { @media screen and (min-width: $large) { @content; } }

This means invoking the mixin in a slightly different way: not as a self-contained function call, the way you'd typically do it, but as a function that acts a little like a selector:

.u-Figure { @include medium() { width: 33%; } }

That @content directive means: "Whatever this mixin is wrapped around, place it here". The compiled CSS looks like this:

@media screen and (min-width: 50em) { .u-Figure { width: 33%; } }

I've only just started doing this, so there may be downsides I haven't anticipated. This centralizes the code a little more, but unless the CSS syntax for media queries drastically changes, I doubt I'll take advantage of that. @content seems pretty powerful, and I'll probably see more uses for this in the future.

It is not just our computing infrastructure that became complex, it's also our computing ware needs that became consequent. DI has a strong coding component. TECHNOTES is different things.

One its like for WiderNet millions upon millions of technotes this time. Ranging from computing to microwave ovens or jet reactors. If you are a computing engineer, an engineer or a mechanic and you are looking for technical documentation it should be there.

Second its developer teams working on the diverse things we want to develop in house such as Hayes2000.

Third its a dot org, an open source repository of things we are developing and that can interest a numbers of developers who want to become involved. And do so from worldwide.

springpad says goodbye

So I loved springpad, had been using it since it began, and always thought there was a lot of potential for ways to use it. I was kind of obsessed about it, actually. It REALLY helped me get organized with all my research and projects and work. Everyone knows the success of Pinterest by now, and a lot of people use evernote, but I'm kind of bummed that springpad never caught on with all those people. What I love about it is that there are diffferent ways to view your information, so you can view it like a list or a grid or my favorite, a board view, which allowed me to see my links and bookmarks and documents exactly WHERE I put them. I could organize them with little headers, and stack them like a pile on a desk, and this was within each notebook. And everything was key-worded, just like my photos in Lightroom.  Springpad did private notebooks before pinterest ever had private boards, so when pinterest came about, I was using both. I love how quickly pinterest works, and how easy it is to share through it, and they finally gave us unlimited private boards, which is ideal, since I use this stuff for planning shoots, events, research... I have to admit that I'd started using google keep more than springpad for my notes, just because it works faster on my phone, and is already synced with all of my accounts, no hassle. Springpad never did make their calendar/alarm integration easier for its users. Google's got that. But its missing some elements, and I still can't easily share my notes from google keep. Pinterest has gotten better, but I still can't organize my documents with my links, or add notes that won't get lost, or visually arrange my pins in a drag and drop manner.  Springpad set up migration to Evernote, and I don't want to lose everything, so I guess my data is moving there for now. Springpad, I'm sad to see you go.

Notegraphy is a web and mobile application that rethinks the way we write and share text online through design

Here's how you change your default server core shell to powershell.  But read everything before you do:

set-itemproperty "hklm:\software\microsoft\windows nt\currentversion\winlogon" shell powershell.exe

To change it back to default, it isn't as simple as setting it to cmd.exe.  Here's what is set by default:

cmd.exe /c "cd /d "%USERPROFILE%" & start cmd.exe /k runonce.exe /AlternateShellStartup

And set-itemproperty doesn't like any of that.  So before you change it to powershell, run this to backup the current setting:

get-itemproperty "hklm:\software\Microsoft\windows NT\currentversion\winlogon" Shell | select -ExpandProperty Shell | out-file defaultshell.txt

Then to bring that back in:

$defaultshell=get-content .\savedshell.txt